Rated 4 out of 5 by Oshri Sharon from Valuable features include a service portal and self-service restore.Valuable Features:* Service portal* Self-service restore* Single pane of glass for management.We are a Managed Service Provider and these capabilities make our platform agile and easy to use for our customers.Improvements to My Organization:* Less IT admin* More performance* More resiliency* More protection of data (lots of storage SnapShots with no performance impact)Room for Improvement:They should expand the eco-system for Virtual Appliances with Acropolis. Network Segmentation is also a must with AHV.Use of Solution:We have used the solution for about 18 months.Stability Issues:We have not encountered any issues with stability.Scalability Issues:We have not encountered any issues with scalability.Technical Support:Technical support is the best.Previous Solutions:We previously used legacy infrastructures: EMC, NetApp, and IBM.Initial Setup:The initial setup takes about one hour and then you are done.Cost and Licensing Advice:I don't have anything special to advise about licensing and pricing.Other Solutions Considered:We evaluated VMware vSAN.Other Advice:Don't be afraid of Acropolis Hypervisor. It is stable and powerful, just as vSphere is.Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:As a Managed Service Provider, we have a strong partnership with Nutanix on our platform for evaluation and testing new software releases.

Date published: 2017-06-24

Rated 4 out of 5 by ChristophHerdeg from Provides data protection in various flavours.Valuable Features:* Data protection in its various flavours.* Overall performance of the platform.* Scalability.* Ease of implementation.* Great GUI.Improvements to My Organization:We can test even the most storage-performance-hungry workloads on our Nutanix blocks.Room for Improvement:Pricing transparency: Software and hardware should be separate items.Use of Solution:I have used it for 12 months.Deployment Issues:We have not encountered any deployment issues.Stability Issues:We have not encountered any stability issues.Scalability Issues:We have not encountered any scalability issues.Customer Service:Customer service is a perfect 10.Technical Support:Technical support is a perfect 10.Previous Solutions:We currently use several HCI solutions.Initial Setup:Initial setup was straightforward.Implementation Team:An in-house team implemented it.Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:We're a partner for Nutanix.

Date published: 2017-05-16

Rated 4 out of 5 by ChristophHerdeg from Provides data protection in various flavours.Valuable Features:* Data protection in its various flavours.* Overall performance of the platform.* Scalability.* Ease of implementation.* Great GUI.Improvements to My Organization:We can test even the most storage-performance-hungry workloads on our Nutanix blocks.Room for Improvement:Pricing transparency: Software and hardware should be separate items.Use of Solution:I have used it for 12 months.Deployment Issues:We have not encountered any deployment issues.Stability Issues:We have not encountered any stability issues.Scalability Issues:We have not encountered any scalability issues.Customer Service:Customer service is a perfect 10.Technical Support:Technical support is a perfect 10.Previous Solutions:We currently use several HCI solutions.Initial Setup:Initial setup was straightforward.Implementation Team:An in-house team implemented it.Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:We're a partner for Nutanix.

Date published: 2017-05-16

Rated 4 out of 5 by Nikhil Bhingarde from Centralized management helps you monitor storage and compute resources at the cluster and VM level in a single plane.Valuable Features:* Compression, deduplication, and erasure coding* Central management using prism* Capacity management and planning using prism central* One click upgrade to the Nutanix OS as well as for hypervisor* Easily scalable with no downtime* Provides WAN optimization for replication to remote sitesImprovements to My Organization:* Centralized monitoring of infrastructure* Easy and quick deployment of VMs* Single SME for all domains like storage, OS, and hypervisor* Compression deduplication and erasure coding have improved storage usage by almost three times* Protection domain allows you to compress data and transfer over WAN and helps you to move a VM to DR with a single click* Centralized management helps you monitor storage and compute resources at the cluster and VM level in a single planeRoom for Improvement:I would like to see improvements in monitoring parameters, RTO, and access control. Currently, memory utilization does not show as per the actual. This is in pipeline for the next release. The current RPO for DC-DR is high due to the limitation of the replication strategy which will be fixed by next quarter.Use of Solution:We have used this solution for three months.Stability Issues:I did not encounter any issues with stability.Technical Support:As of now, we haven’t required support, but it is good.Initial Setup:The installation is simple. You can more or less plug and play.Cost and Licensing Advice:Depends upon what OEM you factor for hardware and the relationship between them. The software license seems to be pretty simple.Other Solutions Considered:We evaluated Cisco HyperFlex and SimpliVity.Other Advice:You can have optimal results from ROI and the infrastructure deployment perspective if the solution is designed properly. I would suggest that you spell out your requirements clearly before Nutanix starts building the solution.Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

Date published: 2017-03-05

Rated 4 out of 5 by Farhan Hafiz from You can ask for a loaner unit to verify performance and match it to your requirements.Valuable Features:The most valuable features are Prism and Acropolis, as they simplified our jobs and give us the opportunity to lower operational costs without reducing the current day-to-day operation performance.Improvements to My Organization:As opposed to before, the Nutanix platform allows us to pay as we grow instead starting with a large scale. Management seems to like this idea, as it will save us from overspending the budget. We can improve IT utilization and reduce costs by consolidating application infrastructure.Room for Improvement:We're thinking about hosting SAP HANA on the Nutanix platform, but we are still unsure about the path as SAP still has not certified Nutanix to host SAP HANA yet. Nutanix should make SAP a close partner and certify their product with SAP so that the consumer has a choice to migrate their existing platform to Nutanix platform.As far as I'm concerned, and we already ran the test on an actual Nutanix box, Nutanix can host the HANA without issue. However, without certification from SAP, it looks like we don’t have a guarantee from SAP itself. That will cause us to question whether we should go with the Nutanix platform.Use of Solution:I have been using it for about five months, and we just got approval from our management to expand the cluster and buy additional hardware from Nutanix.Stability Issues:So far, the operation has gone smoothly without any big issues, although there was a small bug when we tried the one-click update to upgrade all nodes’ firmware. Some nodes did not finish the update. We are resolving it with Nutanix support, so it's fine. It did not impact system uptime.Scalability Issues:I have not encountered any scalability issues at all. We can easily scale this platform as we need.Technical Support:Technical support is 9/10; only one call to local support and then if it hasn’t been resolved, a Nutanix engineer will help to resolve either hardware or hypervisor issues. It gives us really good assurance and we can sleep peacefully at night.Previous Solutions:Previously, we used three-tier architecture, which has lots of points for failure and a lot of consoles need to be attended. It's so tiring and most of the time, we are firefighting to make sure the operation can continue as business as usual. It required a lot of skills and a large sum of money to maintain and to scale, which were painful for us.Initial Setup:Initial setup was straightforward. It takes only one day or less to build up the cluster and provision the virtual machines.Cost and Licensing Advice:The pricing is good for us and just what we are looking for. We can cut off the VMware license and maintenance support, and migrate to Acropolis instead.Other Solutions Considered:We evaluated SimpliVity and HPE solutions. Both failed us in term of economical cost and did not offer features that Nutanix has.Other Advice:You have an option to start small instead of going big at first, which will capitalize your budget. You can ask for a loaner unit from Nutanix to play with; to check and verify their performance and match it to your requirements.Nutanix treats us well. We can say we are happy with the Nutanix offering.Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

Date published: 2017-01-23

Rated 3 out of 5 by Eric Wyman from I can do hypervisor upgrades on all my hosts with a click of a button while in production. Site-to-site replication needs some work.Valuable Features:The level of statistical performance data it is able to report in real time is extremely useful. I can see what my VM’s hosts and guests are doing form a single pane of glass and identify issues before they would otherwise become apparent.Improvements to My Organization:The simplicity Prism/AHV delivers over other hypervisor solutions has dramatically alleviated the workload of our IT department without taking away granular features.Room for Improvement:Site-to-site replication needs some work. It’s not as feature rich for a disaster recovery implementation as I would like to see, but my understanding is that it is slated for improvement in near-future releases. DRS-like functionality is also a much-desired feature that is also slated for future release. Third-party solutions are also few and far between as of right now since Nutanix is so new. In regards to third-party backup solutions, your only agentless option is Commvault, which is expensive, complex and requires intensive vendor training. We opted to use the built-in snapshot replication options to Azure.Use of Solution:I have used it for about eight months.Stability Issues:This is so dramatically more stable than other hypervisor solutions I have used its almost hard to believe. I can do hypervisor upgrades on all my hosts with a click of a button while in production. No need to move or shut down guests or take hosts out of production, or plan off-hours maintenance windows. I don’t need to seek out updates or go extended periods of time because of a lack of awareness of updates. It’s literally as easy as you’d hope for or expect to have… probably more so.Scalability Issues:Scalability is a non-issue, especially if you have Prism Central Pro. The only scale issue we ran into was right-sizing the environment we purchased for our existing needs. We over purchase by quite a lot only because we had no way to measure the deduplication and compression savings until the data was actually imported into the system. The storage savings we received from these features was substantial. We got better than a 2.5:1 ratio on compression, which took our storage usage from 12TB down to about 4TB.Prism Central Pro has a feature called capacity runway that can estimate your growth and inform you when you will need to expand your cluster and even recommend the appropriate node to expand into based on your usage in real time. You can plan your next upgrade 6+ months out with high confidence you’re not over doing it, jumping the gun or purchasing too late and causing your environment to suffer performance issues.Technical Support:The technical support is pretty stellar. Even when you get a tech that isn’t quite on par, it’s easy to get them back on track or escalate the case yourself with a click of a button, not that you really ever have to that often. The response time is very fast. The language barriers are almost nonexistent, and most issues can be resolved the same day with a couple emails and minimal effort. Most of the time, I just inform support that I have opened the support portal and they login and fix the issue without ever needing to try to make our schedules work together, and the next corresponsive is that its fixed already.Previous Solutions:We are currently in the process of switching to AHV from ESXi. We felt the Nutanix solution was significantly easier to manage, has all the features we need, and comparable features to ESX already either exist or are on their way in the near future. We believe that the solution Nutanix offers is the way the market will continue to trend in the future. Finally, going with AHV cuts out ridiculously overpriced costs of ESXi. We were looking at over $100k in licensing with ESXi alone for what AHV will supply us for free.Initial Setup:Initial setup was easy. We could have set it up ourselves; however, Nutanix flew a technician out to use to set up the environment for us. All we had to do was mount our ESXi data pool on Nutanix and vmotion the VMs over to Nutanix, and we were up and running on the new cluster in under a week.Cost and Licensing Advice:I would encourage you to heed the advice of your rep on what to purchase with one exception: Make sure the hardware you’re purchasing is the latest generation of hardware available. Also, Prism Central Pro is worth spending a few extra bucks. I’d also take into consideration that since Nutanix is fairly new, not all ESX-comparable features exist yet, but don’t let that discourage you away from Acropolis, as their development team is top notch and moving fast… the features are coming. If you must have ESX, it runs fantastically on Nutanix, but you’re probably spending more than you need to on licensing it over just using Acropolis and being patient. You’re also taking away many of the feature that simplify your environment by passing up Acropolis.Other Solutions Considered:We spent a substantial amount of time evaluating many other options, including VxRail, EqualLogic and Compellent, the Dell M series blade chassis, NetShelter, Cisco UCS and Nimble, as well as SimpliVity.Other Advice:Do not dismiss Nutanix too hastily over one little feature or another. They are coming, and it is worth your patience. The value brought in simplicity, support and time savings is worth a good hard look. Also, consider purchasing Turbonomic with or before Nutanix. They pair and play well together. Prepping my environment with Turbonomic before migrating made the transition much faster and easier by right-sizing my VMs and it continues to offer great features in my new environment. If you do, make sure they know you intend to move to Nutanix to ensure you license the proper features.Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

Date published: 2017-01-23

Rated 4 out of 5 by SystemsEng634 from We can deploy VM as a service and perform updates on the nodes without downtime.Valuable Features:The consolidated storage: no need to use central storage that has a performance penalty. For example, while using central storage that enables file-sharing NAS services & SAN services, when one VM had an IO overload, all the VMs in the same data store in the VMware environment on the same LUN suffered from I/O latency. Now, in the new consolidated storage, this does not happen.Improvements to My Organization:We can deploy VM as a service & we can perform updates on the nodes without downtime in a very simple, direct way.Room for Improvement:The improvement needed is for elastic clusters, meaning the ability to depart and join nodes in an automatic way. We have a laboratory that needs to perform bare metal tests and therefore needs to unjoin the nodes from the cluster and later on join them back.Use of Solution:I have used it for two years.Stability Issues:I have not encountered any stability issues.Scalability Issues:I have not encountered any scalability issues, but we are about to add another node to the cluster and it should be a very simple task .Technical Support:Technical support is very good, and good with responsive time.Previous Solutions:We were using central storage and suffered from bad performance latency.Initial Setup:Initial setup was straightforward.Other Solutions Considered:At the time we checked, this solution was unique.Other Advice:Perform resizing. Check the needs and deploy only what is needed. Check the memory DIMMs and make sure for the price you get, you have free DIMMs.Disclaimer: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

Date published: 2017-01-23

Rated 4 out of 5 by banc from What you might not know about Nutanix that makes it so uniqueValuable Features:Some years ago when we started working with Nutanix the solution was essentially a stable, user friendly hyper converged solution offering a less future rich version of what is now called the distributed storage fabric. This is what competing solutions typically offer today and for many customers it isn't easy to understand the added value (I would argue they should in fact be a requirement) Nutanix offers today in comparison to other approaches.Over the years Nutanix has added lots of enterprise functionality like deduplication, compression, erasure coding, snapshots, (a)-sync replication and so on. While they are very useful, scale extremely well on Nutanix and offer VM granular configuration (if you don't care about granularity do it cluster wide by default). It is other, maybe less obvious features or I should say design principles which should interest most customers a lot:Upgradeable with a single clickThis was introduced a while ago, I believe around version 4 of the product. At first is was mainly used to upgrade the Nutanix software (Acropolis OS or AOS) but today we use it for pretty much anything from the hypervisor to the system BIOS, the disk firmware and also to upgrade sub components of the Acropolis OS. There is for example a standardized system check (around 150 checks) called NCC (Nutanix Cluster Check) which can be upgrade throughout the cluster with a single click independent of AOS. The One-Click process also allows you to use a granular hypervisor upgrade such as an ESXi offline bundle (could be a ptach release). The Nutanix cluster will then take care of the rolling reboot, vMotion etc. to happen in a fully hyper-converged fashion (e.g. don't reboot multiple nodes at the same time). If you think how this compares to a traditional three tier architecture (including converged generation 1) you do have a much simpler and well tested workflow which is what you use by default. And yes it does automatic prechecks and also ensures what you are updating is on the Nutanix compatibility matrix. It is also worth mentioning that upgrading AOS (the complete Nutanix software layer) doesn't require a host reboot since it isn't part of the hypervisor but installed as a VSA (regular VM). It also doesn't require any VMs to migrate away from the node/host during and after upgrade (I love that fact since bigger cluster tend to have some hickups when using vMotion and other similar techniques especially if you have 100 VMs on a host) not to mentioned the network impact.Linearly scalableNutanix has several unique capabilities to ensure linear scalability. The key ingredients are data locality, a fully distributed meta data layer as well as granular data management. The first is important especially when you grow your cluster. It is true that 10G networks offer very low latency but the overhead will count towards every single read IO so you should consider the sum of them (and there is a lot of read IOs you get out of every single Nutanix node!). If you look at what development is currently ongoing in the field of persistent flash storage you will see that the network overhead will only become more important going forward. The second key point is the fully distributed meta data database. Every node holds a part of the database (the meta data belonging to it's currently local data for the most part and replica information from other nodes). All meta data is stored on at least three nodes for redundancy (each node writes to it's neighbor nodes in a ring structure, there are no meta data master nodes). No matter how many nodes your cluster holds (or will hold) there is always a defined number of nodes (three or five) involved when a meta data update is performed (a lookup/read is typically local). I like to describe this architecture using Big O notation where in this case you can think of it as O(n) and since there are no master node there aren't any bottlenecks at scale. The last key point is the fact that Nutanix acts as an object storage (you work with so called Vdisks) but the objects are split in small pieces (called extends) and distributed throughout the cluster with one copy residing on the local node and each replica residing on other cluster nodes. If your VM writes three blocks to its virtual disk they will all end up on the local SSD and the replicas (for redundancy) will be spread out in the cluster for fast replication (they can go to three different nodes in the cluster avoiding hot spots). If you move your VM to another node, data locality (for read access) will automatically be built again (of course only for the extends your VM currently uses). You might now think that you don't want to migrate that extends from the previous to the now local node but if you think about the fact that the extend will have to be fetched anyhow then why not saving it locally and serve it directly from the local SSD going forward instead of discarding it and reading it over the network every single time. This is possible because the data structure is very granular. If you would have to migrate the whole Vdisk (e.g. VMDK) because this is the way your storage layer saves its underlying data then you simply wouldn't do it (imagine vSphere DRS migrates your VMs around and your cluster would need to constantly migrate the whole VMDK(s)). If you wonder how this all matters when a rebuild (disk failure, node failure) is required then there is good news too! Nutanix immediately starts self healing (rebuild lost replica extends) whenever a disk or node is lost. During a rebuild all nodes are potentially used as source and target to rebuild the data. Since extends are used (not big objects) data is evenly spread out within the cluster. A bigger cluster will increase the probability of a disk failure but the speed of a rebuild is higher since a bigger cluster has more participating nodes. Furthermore a rebuild of cold data (on SATA) will happen directly on all remaining SATA drives (doesn't use your SSD tier) within the cluster since Nutanix can directly address all disks (and disk tiers) within the cluster.PredictableThanks to data locality a large portion of your IOs (all reads, can be 70% or more) are served from local disks and therefore only impact the local node. While writes will be replicated for data redundancy they will have second priority over local writes of the destination node(s). This gives you a high degree of predictability and you can plan with a certain amount of VMs per node and you can be confident that this will be reproducible when adding new nodes to the cluster. As I mentioned above the architecture doesn't read all data constantly over the network and uses meta data master nodes to track where everything is stored. Looking at other hyper converged architectures you won't get that kind of assurance especially when you scale your infrastructure and the network won't keep up with all read IOs and meta data updates going over the network. With Nutanix a VM can't take over the whole clusters performance. It will have an influence on other VMs on the local node since they share the local hot tier (SSD) but that's much better compared to today's noisy neighbor and IO blender issues with external storage arrays. If you should have too little local hot storage (SSD) your VMs are allowed to consume remote SSD with secondary priority over the other node's local VMs. This means no more data locality but is better than accessing local SATA instead. Once you move away some VMs or the load on the VM gets smaller you automatically get your data locality back. As described further down Nutanix can tell you exactly what virtual disk uses how much local (and possibliy remote) data, you get full transparency there as well.Extremely fastI think it is known that hyper converged systems offer very high storage performance. Not much to add here but to say that it is indeed extremely fast compared to traditional storage arrays. And yes a full flash Nutanix cluster is as fast (if not faster) than an external full flash storage array with the added benefit that you read from you local SSD and don't have to traverse the network/SAN to get it (that and of course all other hyper convergence benefits). Performance was the area where Nutanix had the most focus when releasing 4.6 earlier this year. The great flexibility of working with small blocks (extends) rather than the whole object on the storage layer comes at the price of much greater meta data complexity since you need to track all these small entities through out the cluster. To my understanding Nutanix invested a great deal of engineering to make their meta data layer extremely efficient to be able to even beat the performance of an object based implementation. As a partner we regularly conduct IO tests in our lab and at our customers and it was very impressive to see how all existing customers could benefit from 30-50% better performance by simply applying the latest software (using one-click upgrade of course).IntelligentSince Nutanix has full visibility into every single virtual disks of every single VM it also has lots of ways to optimize how it deals with our data. This is not only the simple random vs sequential way of processing data but it allows to not have one application take over all system performance and let others starve (to name one example). During a support case we can see all sorts of crazy information (I have a storage background so I can get pretty excited about this) like where exactly your applications consumes it's resources (local, remote disks). What block size is used random/sequential, working set size (hot data) and lots more. All with single virtual disk granularity. At some point they were even thinking at making a tool which would look inside your VM and tell you what files (actually sub file level) are currently hot because the data is there and just needs to be visualized.E...Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:We are a Partner for three years based in Switzerland.The author of this review previously worked five years at a large storage vendor as System Engineer specialized in Storage, Virtualization and VCE converged infrastructure.